Good hand hygiene practices are a requisite for good health. While personal hand hygiene practices may directly impact the health of an individual, the corporate or institutional practices of individuals associated therewith may greatly impact the health of multitudes of others. It is well known that disease and infection is often communicated from one person to another as a consequence of poor hand hygiene practices by one or more persons in a chain of contact. In the hospitality industry, where employees have contact with food, service ware, bedding and the public, the possibilities for transmitting germs from one person to another are great. Schools, daycare centers, and offices have similar issues. But, the issue is probably most pronounced in the healthcare industry itself.
It is presently believed that hospital acquired infections cause approximately 90,000 deaths per year and nearly one third of these, or 30,000 deaths, are attributable to poor hand hygiene. Indeed, the Centers for Disease Control recognizes improved hand hygiene as a key to substantially reducing hospital or healthcare acquired infections.
The failure of workers to employ good hand hygiene practices and to comply with standards for hand hygiene results from opposition based in apathy, time pressures, resistance to change and the like. Indeed, there are many excuses for the failure to comply with hand hygiene norms in many key industries and, while the healthcare industry will be primarily addressed herein, it will be understood that the problems and resultant solutions presented are applicable to multiple industries and service organizations.
While the need for good hand hygiene has been well known and documented in the past, there has been a egregious failure to develop and sustain improvement. Indeed, it has been extremely difficult in the past to even assess the level of hand hygiene compliance within an institution such as a hospital or the like. Compliance has typically been defined as the number of opportunities that an employee or group of employees have had to wash or sanitize their hands, divided by the number of times that such employee or employees actually did wash or sanitize their hands. In the past, the assessment of compliance has been undertaken by physical observation, by the posting of individuals, cameras or the like throughout a facility to monitor the activities of the employees. In such a system a count is actually made of the number of opportunities that the workers had to wash or sanitize their hands, as well as the number of times that the opportunities were engaged by actual hand washing or sanitizing.
The physical monitoring of hand washing opportunities and hand washing events in the marketplace has been found to be given to significant inaccuracies. Employees who know they are being monitored more often seize the opportunity to sanitize their hands, when they would not have done so absent the knowledge that they were being monitored. Moreover, it has been found that observers occasionally demonstrate bias toward workers or groups of workers. Consequently, it has been found that physical observations tend to skew the count of handwash events actually undertaken by the employees. Further, personal observations within a healthcare or other work facility have typically been found to be intimidating and offensive.
While actual observations have been found to skew the count of handwash events, that technique has been determined to provide a reasonably accurate measure of handwash opportunities within the facility. Indeed, the literature is replete with published reports of handwash opportunities for various healthcare facilities, divisions and subdivisions within hospitals and the like. As matters now stand, information is available for assessing the number of handwash opportunities that present themselves in various healthcare environments, that information having been obtained from actual observation. Accordingly, by extrapolation and further assessment and analysis, it is possible to predict the number of handwash opportunities that will present themselves in a broad range of healthcare environments within a hospital, nursing home, or the like.
However, there remains a need in the art for the provision of a methodology by which hand hygiene compliance can be determined and that will not disrupt or disturb the environment of the hospital or healthcare facility, which will be discrete and non-threatening to healthcare workers to the extent that employment of the methodology within a hospital or the like is transparent to the healthcare workers, and which is easy to use and employ with state of the art and presently existing hand sanitation dispensers employed within the hospital. There is further a need for a methodology by which hand hygiene compliance can be monitored and assessed which is capable of generating a performance index to allow for comparisons between healthcare facilities, wards, divisions, and subdivisions of a similar nature, and which allows for bench marking to allow an analysis of the efficacy of intervention programs. All of this is most desirable while complying with standards set by various governmental agencies such as Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (“CDC”), Joint Commission on Accrediting Healthcare Organizations (“JCAHO”), and Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services (“CMS”).